


A Fugue of the Continuous

by innie



Category: CARTER Angela - Works, Wolf-Alice - Angela Carter
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 10:46:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12703422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: He laps up cool holy water and pisses its warmth away, baring his teeth as he does.





	A Fugue of the Continuous

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IncurableNecromantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncurableNecromantic/gifts).



> Pity my poor beta, rosefox, who tried very hard to get this to make sense and honor the original story.
> 
> Title from the story itself: _Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair._

They try blessings from their Archbishop – blessings on water, as if rippling liquid has the fidelity to be transformed by a mere man, however cloaked in superstition – and their own litany of holy words, learned at their nuns' scabbed knees, and none of it, none of them, can stop him, for he is more than a man. No mirror of their making can hold him any longer. The simpletons of the village would argue that his lack of a reflection signifies his fall from grace, but the truth is, there is no such thing as grace. He laps up cool holy water and pisses its warmth away, baring his teeth as he does.

(He has seen his simple-minded servant, well-formed and ill-used, stand uncomprehending before the expanse of Murano glass, contorting her human shape into the motions of a wolf. He has seen her sniff at her reflection, believing it to be another. He is well content to be above the simple magic of glass treated with fire and chemicals.)

While the villagers are relying on witched water and magicked glass to serve as their weapons, they are blind to how fiercely nature fights for them. The moon is his jailer, for the sun is his torment; the moon takes pains to slap him awake and make his blood sing, and he walks the world – he hunts and takes what he wants – by its light.

(That light shows the girl to be his double and his inverse. Her limbs, in their rounded length, are hazy and luminous and pale as his beneath the fine filaments of her pelt of body hair. But the substantive fact of her body is that she is _structured_ , more than a heaped collection of ragged, clicking limbs. She can move silently while he wants to howl and bay with each pained step.)

That his every step comes at a cost enrages him, beautiful though his tracks are. Animals growl at him as surely as their masters do, but it is only the unthinking malevolences that succeed in injuring him. Thorns do their best to rend him apart, so he is covered in scabs and bruises, the dry sticks of his hairless limbs shedding like chalk. But he is the master of this world, and so he takes on the hurts willingly to diminish them. He succumbs to the pleasurable pains, the spiky blandishments, of silver and iron and salt; he sleeps in a bed of iron to lie on top of the pain and feel its lightning needles throughout his wasted flesh.

(She makes his bed without so much as a flinch, though she is but a female and so ignorant as to believe herself a wolf though her body tells the truth. Her body, he sees, betrays her as only a girl's can: she buds, she bleeds, she is forced to know her own capacity to breed. He feasts on death and she carries life within her – none of the villagers' mealy-mouthed pieties, the nuns' vituperative words recast, can change those truths.)

He has handled women's bodies, exerted his dominance over them, from his first moments, tearing at his mother's nipple with teeth that were sharp enough to cut even his own thin but tender lips, let alone a prize like the pink peak of a soft swell; he has since blunted those teeth nightly on the bones of his passive prizes, only to have them grow sharp again as he sleeps in shadows. The female body is pleasingly vulnerable to depredations, his most of all. Those soft bodies, even lifeless, require so much wrapping, all of the ephemera he peels away to get at the unresisting flesh below. All of those bodies' juicy circulations - of blood, of breath - amount to as little as a clock's eternally sweeping hands once they are dead, though even then they are not still; they slide along, borne by time, into the delicious well of corruption.

(Is that why the nuns left her on his doorstep, his little kitchen maid? Did they mix up their words, scavenger for murderer, and hope that he would strike her dead? Their idiocy is appalling.)

He scuffs the footprints her naked human feet have left in the dust that is flakes of his dead skin. He slits his eyes against the jabbing fingers of moonlight, doubled and doubled again by every mirror in his house, his palace, his prison. He is beyond those bits of glass, free of the words with which his cowering neighbours, those cringing men and the living women shrouded in their habits, try to confine him. When he strides the earth, he runs without symbols, without flesh, even the hyena's pelt he should wear melted away to show only skin the colour of moonlight, stretched too tight over dry bones that have char for marrow. The villagers weigh themselves down with the signs and signifiers of their devotion, though when stripped of them they cannot articulate a single article of that faith. The nuns do better on that score, mouthing their meaningless pieties, but they bury their dead under the guard of stone, not earth, setting themselves uncharitably apart; they do not challenge or acknowledge his dominion and do not risk themselves in offering aid to the rest.

(She has been alone in every way a creature can be: abandoned at birth, the only furless child in her litter, the only wild thing in the convent.) He is alone and she is alone, both in the same space - she placed on his very step like a sacrifice - and that warps their parallel solitudes into a kinship that wrecks them both and makes everything come crashing down.

(She had been perfect, before; perfect because she was wordless. Alone as she was, communication had been precluded. Her dim thoughts could not be crushed or stretched to fit the trap of a communal tongue, and ideas, requiring the clothing of words, could not insinuate themselves into her mind. Without language, she was utterly free. She had no thanks to give for her daily bread, her monthly blood, her glowing skin, her isolation; she could neither write nor be written upon. If he had pulled her apart the way he did his prey, it would have made no difference; she would still have been utterly and simply herself, ineffable. Because she had no language, the name God meant as little to her as the name Mud or Beast or Rain or Mother. They were all just sounds, sounds that penetrated her ear without touching her mind. Sounds that she could reproduce only emptily, stripped of all meaning, insignificant shapes made by her thick tongue and red lips.) 

He is laid low by his enemy after all; they have found a weapon that is neither sharp nor blunted, a trap that he has no means of avoiding. When the girl bends her mouth to him, it is not to speak, to curse him, to scream in horror at his very existence, but to use that mouth the only way she knows how: to lick, to caress, to care. He is alone no longer, after all, and he feels his doom overwhelm him as her perfect lupine tongue undoes his mastery, matches his name of terror to a face that can be seen by the trinkets of the villagers' dim magic.

Writhing in the shafts of moonlight that feel like the golden swords of sunlight, he is compelled to reciprocate the grievous injury. Her presence means he is no longer alone, and he will not be cast down from his imperial, predatory heights without smiting her in turn. When he speaks, he sees understanding just starting to dawn in her empty eyes, a helpless knowledge that he is cursing her with a name, signifying her in a pair of syllables to which she must henceforth answer. "Alice," he spits, and she wails.


End file.
